We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and HPE Hyper Converged based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The customer support provided by StarWind is excellent."
"StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before."
"For those basic uses, it's simple to set up and manage, and it seems to do a fine job."
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"The ability to choose our own hardware and our own vendors for this was hugely beneficial, as we had pre-existing relationships with vendors we wanted to maintain."
"The backup is readily available for use, and the restoration process is easy."
"The best feature is its ease of installation and integration within a current infrastructure."
"In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
"It has reduced downtime. Before, on our previous solution, we used to have downtime on some of the servers because of the sort of convention. But currently I've not experienced any downtime on any of the servers, and there is no more resource congestion."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable feature is the overall integration and just seeing the three different layers which make up the machine software. Altogether, it's something that I would say is much better than any other solution that I have experienced before."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"The support is highly responsive."
"The support team responds quickly."
"Dell PowerFlex is a one-stop-shop solution. Storage, compute, network, application monitoring, and support cases are all combined into one solution. It's very easy to administer compared to when you have a reference architecture where you need to design and build everything yourself. You would also then have to work with multiple vendors."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The scalability of this tool is very good. You can basically add more storage and seamlessly expand the current storage that you have."
"The product enables me to use any software or database."
"No concerns or issues with stability."
"The HPE Hyper Converged solution is used in a hybrid cloud configuration. We assess the disk space and partition additional capacity."
"It provides unmatched performance, productivity and reliability."
"It is easy to manage; the administration is simpler. It saves a lot of rack space in the data center because you can consolidate 20 servers into three to five nodes. The client will be able to benefit from power savings and cost savings as well."
"We like the fact that the hyper-converged infrastructure provides a simple to grow, easy to configure platform."
"The solution's most valuable features are scalability, easy migration, easy recovery, and flexible backup possibilities."
"I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN."
"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."
"I think the setup could be streamlined a bit."
"If there was one thing we could request, it would be the ability to shrink volumes. For example, we want to be able to decrease in the size of the volume."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"We ran into an issue with alerts."
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"StarWind Command Center's single-pane management solution only works with Hyper-V."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"We're also running Hyper-V virtual machines. But we recently discovered that migration of the Hyper-V virtual machines is a bit challenging. Maybe if Dell EMC can come out with a tool that will make it very easy for us to migrate the Microsoft Hyper-V machine, that may be an improvement."
"It would be great to get earlier access to beta builds because we have to develop providers on our own. The APIs and enablers for custom automation could also be improved."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"A software-only version of the solution, without the hardware, would be nice."
"Some improvement is required in the availability of the data and performance. The solution is too expensive for our customers. The pricing should be lower."
"We have faced some challenges when upgrading. With Hyper Converged, you have to fully upgrade because there are no incremental upgrades available in this solution. For example, let's say we have two nodes. If we want to upgrade storage, we also need to upgrade computing. That means a full upgrade EME."
"This solution is very costly."
"Providing local technical support and improving the price are areas this service needs to consider improving."
"One problem I've had is that I was trying to do a move and it was not working. I was given an error and a message asking me to shut down the machine first and then move it to another host."
"The solution is not very stable."
"Installation and setup could be easier."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 11th in HCI with 34 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while HPE Hyper Converged is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Dell PowerFlex writes "Infrastructure management solution that offers rapid provisioning of computer storage but the APIs and enablers for custom automation could be improved". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE Hyper Converged writes " Ensures end-to-end data security with redundancy measures and provides visibility into the system but node expansion challenges". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas HPE Hyper Converged is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, HPE Alletra dHCI and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. HPE Hyper Converged report.
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